Llewellyn Maurice Smith

Project Director at BlueSpark Collaborative

Llewellyn Smith's filmography focuses on stories of history and science that illuminate social inequality and transformation. He is the recipient of Peabody and duPont awards, and other honors.

The groundbreaking projects Llew has produced, directed or contributed to include Eyes On The Prize: America's Civil Rights Years (1987); Race: The Power Of An Illusion (2003); Reconstruction: The Second Civil War (2004); Unnatural Causes: Is Inequality Making Us Sick? (2008); Herskovits At The Heart Of Blackness (2010), American Denial (2015), Wounded Places: Confronting PTSD In America's Shell-Shocked Cities (2014), and Slavery In Effect (2016).

As the first Story Editor for PBS's American Experience (1988) Llew was central in the origination, development and acquisition of more than 70 programs for the acclaimed series. He was project director for the Emmy award-winning series Africans In America: America's Journey Through Slavery (1997), and directed and produced the final episode Judgment Day.

For the PBS science series NOVA, Llew produced and directed Forgotten Genius (2007), the award-winning profile of African American chemist and activist Percy Julian. His film Poisoned Water (2017), an examination of the Flint water crisis, won the AAAS Kavli International Science Journalism Award for best investigative television.

His documentary Cuba's Cancer Hope (2020) tells why some American cancer patients defy the U.S. embargo on Cuba to seek lifesaving immunotherapy treatment in this socialist country. He is a writer/director for documentary series on Future of Work (2021) and the NOVA program Criminals vs Crime (2022), a look at the increasing role of Artificial Intelligence in our criminal legal system.

In 2021 Black Public Media named Llew one of the Top 40 Game Changers in public media over the last 40 years.

He is a director with Sam Pollard for the HBO film The Devil You Know, based on the best seller by NYT columnist Charles Blow (2023).

Annie Stopford, Ph.D.

Co-founder, BlueSpark Collaborative

Annie is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist in private practice and an independent scholar. Since moving to the U.S. from Sydney, Australia, in 2011, Annie has maintained a psychotherapy practice and continued to do psychosocial research and writing, as well as co-founding BlueSpark Collaborative with Llew Smith and working as a producer and researcher for BlueSpark film projects.

Annie’s research projects and publications over two decades have primarily explored intercultural and interracial contact zones, and in more recent years, connections between structural violence and contemporary conditions of violence and trauma in the U.S. Her work has been published in the disciplines of psychoanalysis, Critical Psychology, trauma studies, African studies, and applied violence studies. Her book Trauma and Repair: Confronting Violence and Segregation in America (Lexington, 2020) has been described by distinguished Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson as an important contribution to literature on inequality and poverty in the U.S. and a compelling argument for including the physical and psychological suffering association with community violence in discussion about neighborhood effects.

A selection of Annie’s publications:

Trauma and Repair: Confronting Segregation and Violence in America  2020. Trauma and Repair: Confronting Segregation and Violence in America is an interview-based interdisciplinary exploration of complex trauma in low-income communities and neighborhoods in Baltimore, Maryland; Oakland, California; New Orleans, Louisiana; and Elaine, Arkansas. Read more...

Baltimore past and present: The violent state of segregation. With Gardnel Carter. In J. Adlam, J. Gilligan, T. Kluttig, B.X. Lee & J.L. Young (eds) Violent States and Creative States. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2018, 71-86.

There’s no trust at all, in anything: Psychosocial perspectives on trauma in a distressed African American neighborhood. In O'Loughlin, M. & Charles, M. (Eds.) Fragments of Trauma and the Social Production of Suffering. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014, 221-242

Cambodia’s suffering: Reflections on two journeys to a “broken society”. Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society, 2011, Vol. 16, Issue 2, 209 -217

Leaving “home”: The challenges of living with radical cultural difference. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Oct. 2009, 45 (4) 444-466.

Mothering children of African descent: Hopes, fears and strategies of white birth mothers. Journal of Pan African Studies, Nov. 2007 Vol. 2 No 1
http://www.jpanafrican.com/docs/vol2no1/MotheringChildrenOfAfricanDescent.pdf

Psychoanalysis and interraciality: Asking different questions. Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society, Sept 2007, Vol. 12, Issue 3, 205-225.

Trans global families: The application of African conceptual and ethical systems to African-western relationships and families, Jenda: A Journal of Culture and African Women Studies, 2006, Issue 8.

Hold the cloth that absorbs tears: Migration, money and mutuality in African Australian relationships, Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 2006, Vol. 7, Number 1, 15 – 30.

Researching postcolonial subjectivities: The application of relational psychoanalysis to psycho-social research, The International Journal of Critical Psychology 2004, Issue 10, 13-35.